Canadian Man Attacks Latinx Family With a Bat, Yells ‘ISIS’

Heartbreaking.

All of y’all who like to say you’re moving to Canada? Yeah, you might want to read this first.

Sergio Estepa and his partner Mari Zambrano were walking through a strip mall parking lot with their son and a friend when an unknown man started speaking to them. When the man became aggressive, Estepa started filming and Zambrano called 911. As the situation escalated, the man swung a bat at the kid. Estepa blocked the blows and suffered a cracked rib and a large bruise on his side.

“He started saying we don’t belong here, that we are speaking French,” Estepa said. “But we were not speaking French, we were speaking Spanish. Out of the blue, this guy starts yelling at us. He called me a terrorist, that I’m ISIS, maybe because of my beard. At some point he started to charge my son, and I went in front.”

Estepa also commented on the fact that no one seemed to be interested in helping. In fact, many people pretended that nothing was happening during the attack. The one person who helped happened to be a former vice principal at the boy’s school.

When discussing the incident with their son afterward, Estepa framed the incident as a lesson that he should step in when he sees others being picked on. He goes on to say that the same indifference that the passersby showed was the same thing that tore apart his country.

“The reason we came to Canada is because we lost our country Colombia because of indifference,” Estepa explained. “The war was in the countryside, we live in the city, we don’t care who is killed there. That is the big enemy we have there: indifference.”